Operating unprotected network links for international collaboration between research and education communities, subject to a high-availability production service requirement, is challenging. Provisioning circuits, maintaining a loop-free network topology, and configuring multipath redundancy to provide high availability are complex processes, which involve extensive coordination between, and manual configuration operations carried out by, multiple network operators, resulting in high operations costs. Moreover, network-oriented research applications increasingly require the capability to program network functions to satisfy particular requirements, such as high tolerance, low delay, end-to-end visibility, etc. We describe a solution, based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which significantly lowers the operations costs by automating most network operations and reducing coordination efforts between network operators. The design of the network, before and after SDN was deployed, is discussed. For each network function migrated to SDN, a comparative analysis is provided with metrics, first to represent real measurements before and after each SDN deployment scenario, and second, to describe findings of reduced operations costs.